Page 30 of The Exorcism of Faeries

She was around halfway through her process when a voice broke into her void of focus. “Tell me about the class you’re missing to do this.”

Atta paused, scalpel poised over the heart and looked at Murdoch. “That’s off-topic.”

He shrugged, one corner of his mouth almost twitching. “I’m only trying to help.”

“Or are you trying to see if I can avoid distraction?”

He failed to stop the twitch that time, and a spark shot up her chest at the sight. “You’re clever, I’ll give you that.” His tongue ran over his lips to moisten them and Atta looked back at the ribcage splayed before her. “Let’s say it’s both,” he said. “So tell me what it is you were learning.”

Lips pursed, she jotted down a few notes concerning the cadaver and moved on to her inspection of the lungs. “The class I missed today is studying the interactions between biological, physical, and chemical environmental components.”

He was quiet for a moment, but she ignored it.

“Intriguing. And do you think those interactions play any role in the Plague?”

Atta stilled at his question. Did they? “No,” she said after a moment. “I really don’t.”

He might have asked her more questions, but she didn’t hear if he did, because she’d determined the cadaver’s cause of death.

“All right.” Atta finally stepped back, removing her gloves and wiping her hands with a towel from a stack of them—coarse, hospital-grade.

“Ready to report your findings?” Jesus, he looked bemused, a glitter in his eye.

As soon as she started speaking, his demeanour sobered. “She was killed. By her husband.”

“Ah, ah.” Murdoch stood and came to her side. “It is not the job of even a forensic pathologist to make assumptions like that.” He peered over her shoulder at the cavity where a heart had once beat. Despite their surroundings, she was acutely aware of how close he was standing to her. “Tell me your concrete medical findings and that is all.”

Murdoch stepped back, and Atta continued, beginning with the swelling of the cadaver’s vocal cords, down to the heart with signs of pulmonary oedema, the antemortem and postmortem injuries the woman sustained, and the damage to kidney and liver.

“My conclusion is that this woman sustained injuries prior to her death that were not directly related. Cause of death was prolonged carbon monoxide exposure, leading to poisoning.” She took the booties off her shoes and threw them in the rubbish bin. “And a bastard husband.”

Murdoch’s lips quirked to one side. “I’ll bite. What is your non-professional theory there, hm?”

Atta sighed, looking at the poor woman one last time before she covered her with the sheet. “The indention on her finger, firstly. Yes, all of her personal effects were removed when she passed, but there is something about the indention that leads me to believe she’d already removed the wedding band—fairly recently. The bruises on her arms are consistent with domestic abuse, but it was the metacarpal fracture in the right hand that got me. She was trapped somewhere for quite some time, banging on a wall or door. Trying to get out. That explains the swelling and tearing of her vocal cords as well.”

“But what if she merely found herself trapped somewhere, she wasn’t forced there?” Murdoch challenged, all serious, all professor.

Atta considered that for a moment. She couldn’t very well quote a woman’s intuition, though that was the root of it. “The postmortem bruising on her ankles and wrists.” Atta shook her head. “What grieving widower or anyone else who may have found her would tie her ruthlessly like a hog? It screams of ill-intent.”

Murdoch nodded once and stood upright from where he was leaning on a stool. “Very good, Atta.”

A flurry of moths tumbled around in her abdomen when he said her name. Praised her.

“Do you smoke?”

“No, I don’t. Seen too many charred lungs.”

Murdoch chuckled, a low sound that rolled like thunder in the night. She suppressed a shiver. “We all have to die some way or another. Come with me.”

Atta hated that, currently, she might follow him anywhere despite being the antithesis of that kind of woman. She had self-respect, and he was—sort of—herprofessor,for Christ’s sake.

Alas, she followed the man out a back door that led them to a little courtyard of stone and iron.

Murdoch leaned against the rough side of the building and handed her a file folder. “Take a look.”

While she opened it and made sense of what she was looking at, Murdoch pulled a cigarillo out of his shirt pocket, struck a match, and lit it. He puffed on it, filling the chilly courtyard air with a spicy, sweet scent she would forever associate with him. At least it didn’t give her a migraine this time.

The file he’d given her was a Garda report, detailing the homicide of one Patricia O’Malley.

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